100TB of NASA imagery coming to the WorldWide Telescope

Microsoft has teamed up with NASA in order to expand the imagery its WorldWide …

Microsoft has teamed up with NASA to make planetary images and data available via the Internet under a Space Act Agreement. The goal is to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to make the most interesting NASA content accessible on the WorldWide Telescope. More specifically, NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, is developing a suite of planetary data processing tools that will be used to convert historic and current space imagery data into a variety of formats and images of the moon, Mars, and other planetary bodies. The data which Ames will process and host amounts to over 100 terabytes that the WorldWide Telescope will incorporate later in 2009.

This includes high-resolution imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which launched in August 2005 and returned more data than all other Mars missions combined. Also available will be images from a camera aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which is scheduled to launch this May and will spend at least a year in a low polar orbit approximately 30 miles above the lunar surface.

This agreement builds on a prior collaboration with Microsoft that enabled NASA to develop 3D interactive Microsoft Photosynth collections of the space shuttle launch pad and other facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in August 2007.

The first beta of WorldWide Telescope, which brings together imagery from ground- and space-based telescopes for a guided exploration of the universe, arrived in May 2008 and received a generally positive reaction. In July 2008, less than two months later, the software broke the 1 million download mark. However, just last week, Microsoft announced the alpha version of a web client powered by Silverlight which is expected to further expand the application's audience.